MR. ALLEN: Welcome to POLITICO’s video series. Health Care Diagnosis. I’m Mike Allen, Chief White House Correspondent and we’re in the Capitol in the Chambers of the Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Mr. Leader, thank you for having us in.

MR. MCCONNELL: Glad to be with you Mike.

MR. ALLEN: You’ve delivered your 100th floor speech on health reform since June 1st. Happy Centennial. Did you accomplish what you hoped to?

MR. MCCONNELL: Well obviously for the American people we hoped this bill would not pass. It has a trillion dollars in new taxes and higher insurance premiums for the American people so it’s not something that we’re celebrating, those of us who thought it was the wrong direction to go.

MR. ALLEN: And with 20/20 hindsight would you have taken a different approach?

MR. MCCONNELL: No, I think we came close to preventing this 2,700 page monstrosity from being perpetrated.

MR. ALLEN: So what happened, you say you got close?

MR. MCCONNELL: Well it got 60 votes in the Senate which was the bare minimum and that really was the key to it ultimately passing because the Democrats have such a big margin in the House that it was I think not surprising that they were finally eke it out over there even though the only thing bipartisan about it really was the opposition to it.

MR. ALLEN: Democrats and Republicans say you bear some responsibility for that. Do you regret that you didn’t work with them to get more of your ideas in there rather than just oppose?

MR. MCCONNELL: Well, it was pretty clear from early on. We had Sen. Grassley, Sen. [name] and Sen. Snowe in discussion with them - that the only thing they were inclined to do was to throw a few bones in our direction and get us to swallow a major reorganization of one-sixth of our economy. That would have been a deal without symmetry, it would have been an asymmetrical deal that in the end really had no appeal to our membership.

MR. ALLEN: What do you think will be the worst single consequence of what the President signed?

MR. MCCONNELL: Well I’ll give you an example. It’ll take apparently 16,500 new IRS agents just to enforce the individual mandate and to go around checking on people to make sure they’ve got their government prescribed health insurance which they will now be required to purchase.

On the heels of the explosion of government employees they’ve added 120,000 new government employees here in the last month and we’re a boomtown here in Washington, we’re borrowing money from our grandchildren in order to hire government workers today. And this healthcare bill is entirely consistent with that.

And if you look at the year, Mike, I mean the government is now running banks and insurance companies, car companies. It’s just eliminated the student loan business which will cost 31,000 jobs across America. They’re on a path to double the national debt in five years, triple it in ten, booming the public sector.

This issue really became sort of a metaphor for what the first year of the Obama administration is all about.

MR. ALLEN: Now Mr. Leader what do you hope to accomplish this week during the reconciliation debate?

MR. MCCONNELL: Well, this is the fix it bill for the Democrats. What you will see I think on display here is every Democrat who provided the critical vote to pass the bill the President signed today, many of them will vote against the reconciliation bill, ironically the bill with deeper Medicare cuts than the first bill, higher tax increases than the first bill and still replete with sweetheart deals. So they will then be in a position having voted for it before they voted against it.

MR. ALLEN: Now Mr. Leader it has not been your style to be dilatory for the sake of being dilatory. Do you see your party pushing this debate into the weekend into the recess or do you think it will be done fairly quickly?

MR. MCCONNELL: Well it’s hard to be dilatory on a reconciliation bill because there’s sort of an end game to it and we’ll offer significant amendments, probably quite a few of them, more amendments than we were able to get in a normal process back in December and give our friends on the other side an opportunity to vote.

MR. ALLEN: Now 13 attorneys general filed suit today saying that this bill, the health bill was unconstitutional because of some of the mandates it included. Do you support that suit?

MR. MCCONNELL: Well you know I haven’t studied the issue of whether the individual mandate is constitutional or not but I’m glad they’re litigating it. I think it’s some of the answers that we need to get. State governments have a lot of grievances here you know they’re going to get stuck with significant Medicaid costs down the road which is why you have so many governors upset on a bipartisan basis. And they’re worried about the individual health insurance mandate and I think it’s a legitimate law suit. We’ll see how the courts feel about it.